Hayseed High

The Chicago High
School for Agricultural Sciences prepares students for careers far
beyond the traditional corn and cow pursuits.

They are the most unlikely of farmers working on the most unlikely
of farms. And like most Illinois farmers on this late summer morning,
Xander and Dove O'Connor--brother and sister--are well into their first
chore. But it's the pounding rhythm of the subway, not roosters, that
summons the duo at dawn five mornings a week. And, unlike "real"
country farmers, the O'Connors' first task is simply getting to the
farm.

Xander and Dove are students at the Chicago High School for
Agricultural Sciences. Each weekday, two of Chicago's elevated trains
and a city bus take them far from the Lincoln Park home they share with
their parents and five other siblings to so-called "Farmer High," on
the southwest edge of the city. The school is one of Chicago's nine
magnet schools, and one of two city schools in the nation devoted to
agriculture (the other is in Philadelphia).

Like nearly all of their 450 classmates, Dove and Xander aren't
attending the magnet school because they want to be farmers. Growing up
in the city, they say, they'd never imagined planting corn, milking
cows, and driving tractors would be part of their life experience.

But the agricultural school isn't at all intended tobe a fast track
to farming. Rather, it's an agriculturally focused prep school, where a
tough academic curriculum and hands-on learning ready urban
students--80 percent of whom are black or Hispanic--not only for the
rigors of college but also for careers in the agricultural
industry.

Applications arrive
at the school each year en masse.

"Students here don't come from a traditional farm background," says
Principal Barbara Valerious, who has headed the school since 1987. "And
that's fine," she adds, because "they learn early on that agriculture
is a lot more than farming."

Agriculture today, she says, is "global, high-tech food, plant, and
animal science." Jobs in farm production--corn and cow
pursuits--represent only a small percentage of agricultural
professions.

With more and more rural kids eschewing farm life for more
commonplace city and suburban endeavors, agriculture may seem an
unlikely lure for city-smart teens. Yet applications arrive at the
school each year en masse. Valerious says parents and students are
attracted to the school's small size and safety, especially compared
with Chicago's poorest, overcrowded, and otherwise troubled schools
that some of the applicants are zoned to attend. But its academic and
vocational focus--and the prospects of college and good jobs that
follow--are the school's bread and butter.

David L. Chicoine, the dean of agricultural, consumer, and
environmental sciences at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, recruits heavily from the agricultural high school
and says job opportunities in the agricultural fields--especially for
black and Hispanic professionals--abound. "There's no farm population
left, and we're getting fewer and fewer farm students in our program,"
he says. Consequently, "we're having a hard time supplying students for
all the jobs available."

The popularity of the agricultural high school may signal that a
modern approach to agricultural education could turn this trend around.
Last year, more than 1,000 students applied for 140 of the high
school's freshman slots. The applicants aren't screened for academic
ability. Instead, like at many of Chicago's magnet schools, admission
is based on a lottery that considers racial and ethnic background and
an interview that gauges interest.

Though students at the high school aren't chosen for their test
scores and grades, their achievements have been exceptional: In 1995,
the school had a 91 percent graduation rate, compared with 61 percent
for other schools in the city. And 72 percent of the school's graduates
went on to four-year colleges, compared with 30 percent for the
district. College-bound seniors last year won a total of $1.9 million
in scholarships.

College recruiters
visit the school in droves each fall to lure students into their
programs.

Tiffany Roberson, who graduated near the top of her 1996 class, has
enrolled at Delaware State University in Dover this fall on a full
four-year scholarship to study environmental science. "I loved it
here," she says on an afternoon visit to show favorite teachers a
scholarship award she had just received in Washington from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture. "In grade school, I really got into the
environment and recycling, and my science teacher told me about the
school. I knew then that this is where I wanted to go."

College recruiters visit the school in droves each fall to lure
students into their programs, and several campuses courted Roberson
with full scholarships. Much of her success, she says, is owed to the
school. "I've been blessed," she gushes. "I'm so thankful. I owe this
place a lot."

Over the years, the school gained both local and national attention
for its academic accomplishments and most recently was named one of 10
New American High Schools, an award for instructional innovation given
in May by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Center for
Research in Vocational Education.

Its success brings the curious--reporters, visiting teachers, school
administrators, university professors--to the small, cluttered school,
and staff members and students are adept at handling inquiries and
giving impromptu tours. "People are always poking around here with
their cameras," explains junior Josh Miyake, a big, gentle kid whose
interests are marine biology and basketball star Dennis Rodman. He's
earning summer credits in a food lab making dill and butter pickles,
jams, ketchup, and hot sauce, some of which will sell at a school-run
produce stand.

The academic course is tough: Students at the agricultural school
graduate with 31 credits; the required minimum for the state of
Illinois is 20. And all students must take advanced algebra,
trigonometry, biology, chemistry, physics, and a foreign language, plus
four years of agriculture-science classes. For students, the bounty of
academic demands means heavier course loads, longer school days, and a
lot of summer internships, apprenticeships, and classes--the latter of
which keep the school occupied in July and August.

The school's considerable demands don't faze the O'Connors. Older
sister Divinity, a senior earning summer credits on an exchange program
in rural Russia, liked the school enough for 15-year-old Xander and
14-year-old Dove to follow suit (the school admissions policy
encourages such family bias). "It's been good so far," says Xander, who
has aspirations to work in an agriculture-related business. "No two
weeks here are ever the same." Dove also likes what she's come to know
of the school and thinks she might like to be a teacher. But for now,
she has more immediate plans to make the school's cheerleading
squad.

Although sometimes
teased for going to "Hayseed High," students at the agriculture
school defy any farmer stereotype.

Although sometimes teased for going to "Hayseed High," students at
the agriculture school defy any farmer stereotype. On an August school
day, freshman girls congregate in front of the produce stand and
exchange a battery of compliments on the day's anything but farmlike
attire: miniskirts, sundresses, and strappy, platform sandals. Their
long, ornately painted nails are less than ideal for tilling the
land.

The guys, clad in various Chicago Bulls paraphernalia, polo shirts,
oversized jeans, and baseball caps, stoically huddle and greet each
other with reserved nods. A few of them, emulating their favorite MTV
stars and basketball icons, have nails painted shades of black, purple,
and green. A glance downward finds basketball sneakers, not cowboy
boots. And a check of the pockets on their low-slung jeans turns up
chewing gum, not chewing tobacco.

The school's setting is as surprising as its fashion-conscious
students. It sits in the midst of Mount Greenwood, a largely white,
working-class Chicago neighborhood dotted with modest homes and strip
malls. Only a few distinguishable details reveal the farm focus of an
otherwise bland, brick school building: The school-run produce stand is
stocked, staffed, and ready for business on the front lawn, 50 acres of
farmland sits out back, and farm manager David Foulke buzzes between
the fields and the school's busy, bordering streets on a John Deere
tractor.

"It was hard to picture what a farm in the city would look like
before I came," says Foulke, 27, who grew up on a 120-acre farm in
central Illinois and studied agriculture at the University of Illinois.
"But it works."

A series of weather extremes made this the worst farm season in 20
years, Foulke says. Cornfields, which are supposed to be "as high as
your eye by the fourth of July," are dry and about knee-high this
August day. But Foulke is quick to point out that a bad season of crops
can be a good lesson for students. "They've learned how weather affects
morale, prices in stores, everything," he says. Students will bundle
and sell the dry corn as autumn ornaments, profits for which the
students can keep for personal use.

Foulke, who comes from a family of farmers and hopes to someday
return to his rural roots, concedes that he's among the last of his
breed. "It seems odd," he says of the city-farm. "Fewer farm kids are
willing to stay in the business, and here, people are banging down the
door to get in."

The school's
curriculum readies urban students for the rigors of college and a
career in agriculture.

The farm and its adjacent school were once distinct entities.
Although the city has owned the farm since 1846, the land was leased to
farmers who sold their produce from a roadside stand. Its adjacent
school, the former Keller Elementary School for Gifted Children, was
built in the 1950s to accommodate 300 students.

In the late 1970s, the near-bankrupt Chicago board of education
began eyeing the property--known as "Chicago's last farm"--as ripe for
sale to developers. Mount Greenwood fought to save the beloved land,
and in 1985, the board decided to use the property for its first
agricultural high school. Under a court-sanctioned desegregation plan
in place in Chicago schools since 1980, the school needs a minority
enrollment of 65 percent to 85 percent. (Today, the racial makeup of
the school is about 19 percent white, 64 percent black, 16 percent
Hispanic, 0.6 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, and 0.4 percent Native
American.)

Years of budget constraints and red tape prevented expansion of the
former elementary school. Students and staff have been squashed into
all corners of the school, and every kernel of space serves multiple
purposes: Classrooms are transformed into lunchrooms and gyms (there's
no cafeteria or gymnasium); hallways into meeting rooms (there's no
auditorium). The school library is crammed into a tiny classroom.

Teachers share "offices" with tilapia-filled aquariums, caged mice,
and lawn mowers. Books and equipment--which today includes a dozen or
more 40-pound bags of dirt and hundreds of poinsettias ready for
planting in the greenhouse so they'll be ready for sale come
Christmas--are piled everywhere. A labyrinth of portable classrooms
spills into the farm fields.

With no facilities to house them, farm animals at the school are
always "just visiting." And on this day, a lamb and a few turkeys,
chickens, and ducks are touring the school's small, triangle-shaped
courtyard, wandering over pavement and around park benches.

But after years of heated struggle over zoning between the school
and Mount Greenwood, major renovations and a 25-acre facility expansion
are finally under way. The state-of-the-art facilities will double the
size of the school and allow 150 additional students to enroll, easing
overcrowding and providing the cafeteria, gymnasium, library,
laboratories, and buildings for farm equipment and animals that the
school so desperately needs.

The summer day on the city-farm is winding toa close, and
agricultural-science teacher William Smith, a 10-year veteran of the
high school, is wrapping up his "Intro to Ag" lecture to a group of
wide-eyed freshman.

"Remember the first day when I asked how many of you were involved
in agriculture?" he asks. "Well, no one raised their hand. And then I
asked how many of you eat, cook, shop, and everyone did. Well, that's
being intimately involved in agriculture."

With their Future Farmers of America handbooks open prominently
before them (all students at the school must become FFA members), the
students take turns naming their career interests and figuring out
whether those interests have anything to do with agriculture.

"Remember," Smith says, intent on fusing the connection between
their lives and agriculture in the final moments of his class period,
"nearly 20 percent of all jobs in this country are related to
agriculture. And only 8 percent of those jobs are actually working on a
farm. The rest are in business, science, marketing, and
communications."

"Environmental science. Food science and technology. There are
hundreds of different career opportunities," he enthuses.

The tempo breaks when a student proclaims that he'd like to be a
composer. "A musical composer, hmm," Smith says, hesitating to think
how a composer might possibly be linked to agriculture. There is a long
pause.

"Agricultural services!" he declares, reading from his teacher's
guide. "You'd be providing a paid service, a specialty."

But the students look bewildered. Rumbling erupts in the class.
Smith knows that he's reaching with this one and gently laughing, lets
it go, admitting that some of their vocations may lie outside the
agricultural arena.

He assigns homework and makes a fleetingreference to Oliver Wendell
Douglas (Eddie Albert)--the farmer in the 1960s television comedy
"Green Acres" who, with reluctant wife, Lisa (Eva Gabor),leaves behind
the good life in Manhattan for more simple pleasures on a farm in
Hooterville. Class is dismissed.

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